Going Topless, Tig Notaro Takes Over Town Hall

Tig Notaro couldn’t possibly deliver a stand-up act as bold as her last one, right?

How can you get more startling than walking onstage and saying: “Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you”?

That 2012 show confronted her breast cancer with unsparing honesty and comedy as intricate as it was raw. Louis C.K. called it one of the greatest sets he had ever seen.

Which made her New York Comedy Festival performance on Thursday night at Town Hall all the more remarkable. After revealing that she had undergone a successful double mastectomy with no reconstructive surgery, she told the crowd that she had thought of doing the show with no shirt, almost daring the audience to make her do it. One more shout from the fans, and she ripped off her shirt with one tug, standing topless, wearing only jeans, in front of hundreds of people.

She had done this before, at a show at the Los Angeles club Largo last month, and on Thursday, her demeanor remained firmly wry. “I’m very aware that people are like: ‘When is she gonna?’ ” she said, referring to putting her clothes on. “I’m not gonna.”

Comedians often show audiences their scars, but never so literally. The point here was not merely to shock, as quickly became clear. In fact, it was to convince us that there is nothing to be shocked about. For the next 30 minutes, Ms. Notaro told jokes so funny and involving that any anxiety or tension in the room disappeared.

It was a set as unusual and funny as the 2012 one (also at Largo), but was even truer to her singular aesthetic. She showed the audience her scars and then, through the force of her showmanship, made you forget that they were there. It was a powerful, even inspiring, statement about survival and recovery, and yet, it had the larky feel of a dare.

Ms. Notaro became famous for a set that was something of an anomaly in her career, far more confessional and straightforward than her usual work. Before she talked about cancer onstage, her comedy was unsentimental and formally experimental in a way that drew attention to its own artifice. It was more Andy Kaufman than Richard Pryor.

Thursday’s show, part of her “Boyish Girl Interrupted” tour, was a return to form, albeit a little more caustic than usual. It was as if she had set out to prove that cancer (and success) would not soften or compromise her comedy. She alternated between moments of delirious silliness (like getting the crowd to sing “Yellow Submarine” while imagining the scene when Ringo Starr explained to his wife that he had written the song) and a sunny aggressiveness that could even become slightly hostile with the audience.

Even standing onstage half-naked, she offered comedy that kept you at a distance. Her jokes hinged on digressions that appear more chaotic than they really are. A story about trying to cast a man to play Santa Claus in a comedy video had a tricky structure similar to that of one of her classic old bits about repeatedly meeting the singer Taylor Dayne, an increasingly bizarre tale told in such an odd, fragmented manner that you started to distrust it.

Ms. Notaro likes replaying events from multiple perspectives and delights in how inflection can change the meaning of a joke — for example, examining how subtle shifts in emphasis can change the phrase “That’s what she said.”

She performs casual offhandedness convincingly, but make no mistake: Her work is meticulous. Like a master magician, she gives the audience members the illusion of control, while pushing their buttons the whole time.

The difference in this show was that the way she manipulated the crowd was more pointedly overt, and manipulation was actually the show’s dominant theme. Taking her shirt off is not a subtle attention grab, but neither is orchestrating a standing ovation through some funny passive-aggressiveness.

Ms. Notaro’s new act is not just about conquering illness. It’s an ingenious expression of the commanding and persuasive power of art. She shows that comedy can not only transform tragedy into humor, but that it can also distract people from the most marketed and objectified image in popular culture: the naked female body. It can move a crowd into standing and cheering for three minutes, too.

There we all were, laughing at ourselves for doing what we were told. As we did, Ms. Notaro slowly picked her clothes off her stool, unfolded them and carefully put them on like a professional who had finished a satisfying day at work, and was not ready to slip on some pajamas. Not content to settle for an ordinary exit, she leapt offstage into the crowd and walked down the aisle, triumphant.

Tig Notaro’s tour continues at the Wilbur in Boston on Saturday; tignation.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Sheds Her Shirt and the Stigma of a Disease. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe